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My CS1 prof seems to prefer pushing his own IDE (read: he wrote it himself) called JavaRoom.

Anyway, I use Eclipse for a few reasons. First of all, it's really flexible so I can go in and change a whole lot of setting which are then saved to my workspace. Then I can keep this workspace on a USB flash drive or something and use it on my laptop, desktop, friend's desktop, or any of the PCs at school and it'll load up the exact UI settings and the same working environment I was using before. Beyond that, Eclipse has some really nice auto-compillation and auto-build functions that just make life easier. It also dynamically finds syntax errors as you write your statements so you don't compile your classes and find only at the end that you fucked up big time with some 500 syntax errors.

An anonymous reader writes "GDC 2007: "The Wii is a Piece of Sh*t!", One of Spore's developers rants about Nintendo's "two GameCubes stuck together with duct tape." During a session at GDC this morning titled 'Burning Mad — Game Publishers Rant,' time was taken about half way through to allow developers a chance to spew their own rants. One speaker, Chris Hecker, currently working on Spore at Maxis, took the opportunity to call out Nintendo for not taken games seriously. IGN has the details: http://wii.ign.com/articles/771/771051p1.html"

thefickler (1030556) writes "The launch of Vista could cut Mac market share in the short term, according to investment banking firm Piper Jaffray. However, the firm also said that some PC users might buy a Mac instead of upgrading to Vista."

mairas writes "The electric solar wind sail, or a large set of long, thin conducting wires set up radially like the spokes of the wheel, may yet provide a relatively simple way to set up extremely large solar wind sails: a solar-powered electron gun is used to create a high positive voltage in the wires. Positively charged solar wind particles see the electric fields of the charged wires as opaque obstructions, thus accelerating the spacecraft. The article states that small payloads could be sent to Pluto in less than five years using electric solar wind sails."

CSMatt writes "I find it puzzling and interesting that, given all of Microsoft's negligence on Windows, the community still doesn't seem to support ReactOS development near as much as the Linux distributions or even the BSDs. ReactOS could easily do to Windows what the GNU project did to UNIX, but it seems like it is constantly falling short of a suitable Windows alternative due to either a lack of developers or a lack of money. Yes, I know that it takes about a decade for the community to write a complete operating system, and it will probably take at least 15 years to write one as complex as Windows, but there still seems to be something that is slowing the project down. Is it disbelief that the final version will be able to provide compatibility with Vista or Vienna programs because ReactOS will inevitably have to play catch-up with Windows? Is it the idea that it would still be used only by hobbyists and free software advocates, even though it is possible that the low price of zero might woo OEMs into preinstalling it?"

ack154 writes "Engadget has a story about Sony and Universal Music apparently denying Zune owners the ability to 'squirt' songs by certain artists to other Zune users. That's right, if you've actually purchased songs from the Zune marketplace and happen to run into another Zune owner, you're prohibited from sharing certain songs. From the article: 'In a non-scientific sampling of popular artists by Zunerama and Zune Thoughts, it looks like it's roughly 40-50 percent of artists that fall under this prohibited banner, and the worst news is that there's no warning that a song might be unsharable until you actually try to send it and fail.'"